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Users Still Like to Copy and Paste When Sharing Content

If you’re in a news organization, and you have a hand in any discussions about social media strategy, I can almost guarantee that you’ve chatted about share tools. Regardless of whether you’ve discussed the type of share tool package you’re using or where the buttons reside on a page, the discussion has happened.

According to an Adweekstory, which shared information from Tynt—a company that tracks copy and paste content from roughly 600,000 publishers’ sites and reviews 30 billion data points each month—users are still very fond of using the old-fashioned Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V keyboard shortcuts when sharing content.

Adweek has more on this:

“About half the content people cut and paste is being shared with others, potentially amplifying the publisher’s audience, but the rest of the time, they’re searching or saving for their own use.”

Here are some interesting stats from the piece:

82 percent of all content sharing is completed by copying and pasting

88 percent of all copies are text and 12 percent are images

Roughly 53 percent of copied content is being shared through social media

About 35 percent of copied content is being shared via email

Copied content from Entertainment or Arts sites are most often shared through social media, with 65 percent of that type of content being shared through this medium

What type of user are you? Do you regularly use share buttons when you’re accessing websites or do you copy and paste? Can news organizations use this information to change how they present their content?